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"Born as I was the citizen of a free state, the very right to vote imposes on me the duty to instruct myself in public affairs, however little influence my voice may have in them."

--- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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Can porn stars be teachers?

As the Daily Mailcontinues to expose them, Hannah Maslen seems to find the phenomenon dubious before concluding in cautious favour:

Whilst drinking and smoking can be kept within one’s private life, evidence of pornographic stardom is less easily concealed, less easily kept private. If a teacher were to repeatedly come into school drunk, or hungover to an extent that he couldn’t teach properly, then his drinking would become relevant to his professional role. In noticing this, we can perhaps re-frame what is at stake: it is not that professional role is expected to extend into private life but, rather, that there is an obligation not to allow one’s private life to (detrimentally) intrude on one’s professional role.

But as she also notes, any non-illegal and legitimate use of one’s private time could easily through coincidence have a detrimental effect upon the performance of one’s job. She imagines students discovering that a male teacher does cheerleading, thereby appearing to undermine his credibility. But let’s make the point starker: what if a class of boys which inevitably toys with mild homophobia in their teenage years were to discover that one of their male teachers were gay? This could, quite easily, ‘intrude’ on one’s role insofar as you might fail to command the authority over the classroom that you previously did, detracting from the learning environment. Hence, fire the teacher? Please.

This kind of thing makes my skin crawl. To reason in that way, or, worse, to make any judgements about the virtues of a teacher’s interests and claim they are not appropriate role models accordingly is about as illiberal as things get. The purpose of education isn’t to carve out adults in accordance with some subset of the population’s idea of a ‘good’ person. So even if, bizarrely, the fact one’s teacher was a porn star did incline pupils to give that career path more consideration, so what? We object, and only employ teachers who were previously Benedictine nuns?

I think there are, inevitably, some criteria built into the workplace that means it is relevant to step into the private realm and assess a person’s character. But I don’t mean anything of this variety. I mean things like: whether the teacher, or any other employee for that matter, spends his evenings campaigning on behalf of the KKK. Those sorts of considerations do seem to be of a different, appropriate sort, because an employee’s beliefs may render their ability to treat people equally impossible. This is a hunch, but I imagine a justifiable one. I’m optimistic we can draw a line that allows for that sort of discrimination without opening the floodgates to banning porn stars, just because some social stigmas continue to linger around sex.

Because obviously people who teach children shouldn’t have sex lives or show their genitals to adults because genitals are dirty, and sex is wrong and icky, and the bible says so. Excellent point!
Please don’t eat a landmine.

Sadly, Roger, one’s children will always be educated by teachers drenched in sin, for “all have sinned and fall short of God’s glory.” While I’m unsure about this specific example under discussion, biblically it’s just completely clear that there is no hierarchy of sin.